All posts tagged ‘android’

File Under: Browsers
May
15
2012

Firefox for Android Preps for Prime Time

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Flash Player running in Firefox for Mobile. Photo: Scott Gilbertson/Wired

Mozilla has released an update for its Firefox for Android beta mobile web browser. The latest beta sports a redesigned interface that looks a little less like Firefox and a little more like a native Android application.

If you’d like to help Mozilla test this beta, head on over to the Android marketplace and download a copy today. Unlike the recently updated Chrome for Android, which requires the latest and greatest Android Ice Cream Sandwich, Firefox for Android will run on Android Froyo 2.2 and better (it is, for the moment, only available in English, though).

The newest Firefox for Android beta is — despite looking a bit different from the early mobile releases — still pretty much the Firefox you know and love, with support for mobile add-ons, tabbed browsing and Firefox Sync, as well as the mobile-friendly “Awesome Screen.”

The Awesome Screen is similar feature-wise to the Awesome Bar in desktop Firefox, but tweaked to make mobile browsing and searching easier. To use it, just tap the location bar and you’ll see a list of your favorite bookmarks, history items and search engines.

Mozilla says the latest Firefox for Android beta starts up faster and some improvements to the underlying code should make for faster response times, better graphics performance and smoother panning and zooming. And while it’s not the only Android browser to do so, Flash fans will be happy to know that Firefox for Android continues to ship with Flash despite Adobe’s decision to stop developing the mobile Flash plugin.

The major focus for this beta release is getting the new native interface in Firefox for Android ready for prime time, so if you do decide to test it, be sure to let Mozilla know if you encounter any bugs.

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File Under: Browsers
Apr
19
2012

Google Cloud Print, Now With PDF Power

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Printing to Android. Image: Google

Google has updated its Cloud Print service with a couple of new features aimed at making it easier to move documents from your phone or tablet to a dead tree near you.

Cloud Print, which was first introduced in 2010, is designed to make it easy to print files from Android devices (and Chromebooks). The latest version adds support for printing to a local FedEx office as well as integration with some new Canon printers that will natively support Cloud Print.

Near the bottom of Google’s announcement is another feature that’s far more useful: “printing” to your Android device. Provided you’ve installed the latest Chrome for Android Beta on your phone and are signed in to your Google account, your Android device will now appear as a destination printer in the Cloud Print dialog. Select your device and Cloud Print will send a PDF to your phone, which will then automatically open it in Chrome for Android.

While you can accomplish something similar using services like Dropbox to sync PDFs to your phone (or iTunes if you’re an iOS user), Cloud Print’s print to Android is one of the easiest, fastest ways I’ve seen to get just about any file or webpage to a phone.

The only catch is that, as with the Chrome for Android beta, you’ll need to have Android 4 or better installed on your phone or tablet.

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File Under: Browsers, Mobile
Apr
18
2012

Chrome for Android Doesn’t Need No Stinking Mobile Websites

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Chrome for Android. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired.com

Google has released an upgrade for its new Chrome for Android web browser. Chrome for Android — which was released earlier this year — is still a beta release, but the latest version adds several nice new features, including a way to circumvent websites that try to force a mobile version on you.

The latest version of Chrome for Android can be downloaded from the Google Play store. Note that Chrome for Android requires Android 4.0 or better.

This release fixes a number of bugs and adds some new features, like the ability to reload a site that has redirected you to a mobile page. Despite Jakob Nielsen’s recent pronouncement that users want to be auto-redirected to simplified mobile sites, Google’s Chrome for Android developers think otherwise.

Chrome for Android’s new feature subverts websites that automatically redirect you to a mobile version by spoofing Chrome for Android’s user agent string, in this case sending the string for the desktop version of Chrome instead of the mobile (which developers should note has been updated as well).

The new feature means that if a site offers a sub-par mobile experience by default, you can always reload the desktop version with the press of a button.

Also new in this release is the ability to add bookmarks to your home screen for fast access to your favorite sites and web apps.

In addition to the new features, Chrome for Android is now available in 31 more languages and in all countries where Google Play is supported. Chrome for Android is still a beta release and there are plenty of known issues, but the browser is getting closer to a finished product.

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File Under: Browsers, Mobile
Oct
17
2011

Firefox for Android Plans to Go Native

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Firefox on Android.

Mozilla is planning a makeover for Firefox on Android. The company has announced it plans to abandon the usual Firefox look on Android mobile devices and will instead use Android’s native user interface widgets.

Switching to native widgets on Android will mean a faster, more responsive mobile browser, but it might also make for a Firefox no one recognizes.

Under the hood Firefox for Android will still use the Gecko rendering engine, but without the XUL interface that powers Firefox on every other platform, Firefox for Android might be missing its familiar look.

XUL, which comes from the mouth-twisting phrase eXtensible User interface Language, was originally developed so that Firefox could have a similar interface across platforms. That is, with a few tweaks to Gecko, Firefox can easily move from Windows to Mac to Linux and back while maintaining a reasonably consistent appearance. Behind the scenes XUL means that Firefox has to do some extra work to draw itself on the screen, but on the desktop it’s hardly noticeable.

However, on mobile platforms, where memory and processors are still very limited, XUL is slowing Firefox down.

Writing on the Mozilla Mobile Platforms mailing list, Johnathan Nightingale, Director of Firefox Engineering, says that the move to a native Android interface will mean faster startup times, significantly less memory usage and a much snappier user interface — particularly when performing common mobile tasks like zooming and panning.

Of course everything in software is a trade off and the significant downside to using native elements for Firefox on Android is the possible loss of XUL-dependant add-ons. Nightingale says that the mobile team is working with the add-on team to find a solution, but so far nothing has been decided for sure. One possible solution would be to use native widgets for the main Firefox interface elements, but keep XUL around under the hood so that add-ons could still function.

Another concern is that, without its familiar user interface, Firefox won’t really be any different than other Android browsers. Firefox developer Robert Kaiser writes that he believes a “Firefox with native Android UI won’t be very much better than the native Android browser.”

Asa Dotzler, community coordinator for Firefox, is more confident, claiming that Mozilla is “not bound by any technology,” and that, if it needs to, Mozilla can “make add-ons work with a native [Android] UI.”

Nightingale says that a decision regarding add-ons will be made in the next few weeks, but that “Firefox 8 and 9 will ship with the XUL UI,” including the new user interface for tablets, while work continues on the native Android version. In other words, the native version isn’t likely to arrive until Firefox 10 rolls around in 2012.

If you don’t want to wait that long there is already a branch of Firefox on Android using the native widgets. There’s no binary yet, but if you want to try it out you can grab the source and compile it yourself.

Photo: Johan Larsson/Flickr

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File Under: Browsers, Mobile, Web Apps
Aug
24
2011

Mozilla’s WebAPI Wants to Replace Native Apps With HTML5

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Mozilla has launched an ambitious new project aimed at breaking down the proprietary app systems on today’s mobile devices. The project, dubbed WebAPI, is Mozilla’s effort to provide a consistent, cross-platform, web-based API for mobile app developers.

Using WebAPI, developers would write HTML5 applications rather than native apps for iOS, Android and other mobile platforms.

Mozilla isn’t just talking about WebAPI, it’s already hard at work. It plans to develop the APIs necessary to provide “a basic HTML5 phone experience” within six months. After that the APIs will be submitted to the W3C for standardization.

Among the APIs Mozilla wants to develop are a telephone and messaging API for calls and SMS, a contacts API, a camera API and half a dozen more.

If those APIs sound vaguely familiar it might be because the W3C’s Device APIs Working Group is covering similar ground.

So, why the new effort from Mozilla? Well, Mozilla’s WebAPI is a part of its larger Boot to Gecko Project, which aims to eventually develop an operating system that emphasizes standards-based web technologies. With that end goal in mind, WebAPI may end up somewhat different than what the W3C is trying to build.

It’s also possible that Mozilla simply doesn’t want to wait for the Device APIs Working Group. Mozilla wants WebAPI up and running in a mere six months, the W3C’s Device APIs Work Group is unlikely to move that fast. But “the idea is to collaborate with W3C and all players and together form a good solution, and not just dump it on them,” says Mozilla Technical Evangelist Robert Nyman in a comment on his post announcing WebAPI.

The dream of write-once, run-anywhere software is nothing new and, if history is any guide, Mozilla’s WebAPI efforts may well be doomed. The open source giant does have one thing going for it that most other efforts have not — the open web. Most write-once, run-anywhere attempts have come from companies like Adobe and were built around proprietary frameworks. WebAPI doesn’t suffer from vender lock-in the way some projects have. WebAPI’s main roadblock is convincing other mobile web browsers to support the APIs.

For WebAPI to appeal to developers, Mozilla will need Apple, Google and other mobile browser makers to implement the APIs so that WebAPI can compete with native applications. Before you dismiss that as an impossibility, bear in mind that Apple’s original vision for iOS app development was based around HTML applications, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a company more eager to embrace web apps than Google. Whether either company will devote any resources to implementing WebAPI remains to be seen. But if Mozilla can get WebAPI standardized by the W3C other browser makers would likely support it.

Mozilla’s plans for WebAPI are certainly ambitious, but the company is putting its money where its mouth is — Mozilla is currently hiring several full time engineers to work on WebAPI.

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